The present disclosure relates in general to enterprise management, and in particular to techniques for managing the organizational structure of an enterprise.
Many enterprises use a suite of software applications (referred to herein as “enterprise applications”) to manage various aspects of their business affairs. For instance, an enterprise may use a Human Resources (HR) application to manage information and perform administrative functions pertaining to its employees, a Financials application to track its costs and revenues, and so on. By implementing these types of applications, enterprises can improve their operational efficiency, ensure adherence to organization policy, and facilitate the realization of business objectives. Examples of commercially available enterprise application suites include, without limitation, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, PeopleSoft Enterprise, and the Oracle eBusiness Suite, all available from Oracle Corporation.
In a typical enterprise application suite, the organizational structure of an enterprise is modeled using several different hierarchies. Each hierarchy represents a different manifestation of the organizational structure (e.g., reporting structure, cost structure, etc.). For example, an HR application in the suite may maintain a reporting hierarchy (corresponding to a reporting structure) that identifies business units in the enterprise and reporting relationships between those business units. As another example, a Financials application in the suite may maintain a cost center hierarchy (corresponding to a cost structure) that identifies cost centers in the enterprise (i.e., entities that generate costs or revenues) and cost rollup relationships between those cost centers. From the perspective of the application suite, these hierarchies are unrelated. However, in actuality, the entities included in these hierarchies may overlap to a degree. For instance, a business unit in the reporting hierarchy may have its costs tracked in the general ledger of the enterprise, and therefore correspond to a cost center in the cost center hierarchy.
The maintenance of separate, but overlapping, hierarchies as described above can be problematic when an organizational change occurs in the enterprise. For example, if a change is made to a business unit in the reporting hierarchy that corresponds to a cost center in the cost center hierarchy, both the reporting and cost center hierarchies must be updated to properly reflect the change. Similarly, if other hierarchies maintained by the application suite are affected by the organizational change, they must also be updated accordingly. The need to update multiple hierarchies in this manner can be cumbersome, time consuming, and error-prone.